SIFT - A Component-Based Integration Architecture for Enterprise Analytics

Architectures and technologies for enterprise application integration are relatively mature, resulting in a range of standards-based and proprietary COTS middleware technologies. However, in the domain of complex analytical applications, integration architectures are not so well understood. Analytical applications such as those used in scientific discovery and financial and intelligence analysis exert unique demands on their underlying architectures. These demands make existing COTS integration middleware less suitable for use in enterprise analytics environments. In this paper we describe SIFT (Scalable Information Fusion and Triage), an application architecture designed for integrating the various components that comprise enterprise analytics applications. SIFT exploits a common pattern for composing analytical components, and extends an existing messaging platform with dynamic configuration mechanisms and scaling capabilities. We demonstrate the use of SIFT to create a decision support platform for quality control based on large volumes of incoming delivery data. The strengths and weaknesses of the SIFT solution are discussed, and we conclude by describing where further work is required to create a complete solution applicable to a wide range of analytical application domains